On the face it, the premise of Strangers by Belle Burden might repel some readers. A Waspy, privileged, New York woman is suddenly left by her successful, hedge fund husband. What’s new? you might think. That was my reaction too, however, as I started reading I was won over by Burden and her portrayal of grief, confusion and loneliness. Sure, millions of women around the world have been in a lot more dire straits than Burden, but the trauma of being abandoned is universal.
A week into Covid lockdown, Burden’s husband James (a pseudonym, but a Google search will reveal his true name in seconds) abruptly announces he is leaving her for another woman and that he’s willing to forgo custody of their three children, refusing to provide an explanation. He packs his bags and departs, leaving a stunned Burden.
Having escaped their New York City flat to hunker down in their holiday home on Martha’s Vineyard, Burden is left isolated and shocked on an empty, wintery island, unable to see friends and family. The first few months in isolation are gruelling. Desperately trying to shield her teenage children, Burden goes about playing happy family – minus dad.
As lockdown eases, she finds that her change of status from married to divorced has immediate social consequences. Some people avoid her like a contagious disease and her conservative country club – the life blood of their social lives – question the legitimacy of her membership. In fact, the entire New York upper-class’ 1950s attitudes to divorcees and unfaithfulness will make you want to run the other way.
As a reader and outsider, it’s hard not to see the signs that James is a cold jerk (keeping in mind, of course, that this is her telling the story). Burden, however, is oblivious; enthralled by her kind, family-loving husband and playing the perfect, compliant wife.
What makes this book interesting though, is more the emotional impact on Burden, than the bad mouthing of her ex-husband of which there is remarkably little. She explains in painful detail how her body still yearns for him physically and emotionally, long after her brain has concluded he’s an awful person, the gaping black whole left where her self-confidence used to be and how her delegation of all financial affairs to James comes back to bite her.
With the help of some loyal friends and family, a meaningful volunteer job as an immigration lawyer and a writing course, she picks up the pieces and rebuilds a new life, culminating in a much-praised article published in the New Yorker, the seed for this book.
I wasn’t sure I would like Strangers, but Burden’s honest writing won me over. Behind the perfect facade is a real, living, vulnerable human.
Strangers by Belle Burden is published by Ebury Press, 256 pages.
